I have not. I was planning on doing a “if you haven’t heard from me by now, then I haven’t heard from you” post this week. I’m actually really alarmed by the number of people who say have emailed me with no response.

I am beginning to suspect that Thunderbird’s spam filter is a kleptomaniac.

The address is 10 years old and I was not particularly secretive about it. About 50 spams make it through the adaptive filter and must be manually sorted. Now I’m thinking the AF eats some valid ones as well.

Its possible. From what I’ve seen the filter is rather hit and miss with stopping spam. Sometimes letting it through, sometimes stopping it, sometimes stopping legitimate emails that you even have in your address book.

Despite the retro graphics it actually needs a reasonably up-to-date machine to run. (I’m not sure what the actual system demands are, but I’ve got a five year old laptop here that can just barely run the game on minimum settings.)

That’s likely because Minecraft creates (procedurally) a playable area eight times greater than the surface area of the Earth. (Source)

It doesn’t create(nor store) it all at the same time, so it ain’t quite that the problem. It still has to keepa lot of thing in its memory and generate and update them quite rapidly specially when moving so that’s the biggest performance hog.

Minecraft is capable of generating a surface area approximately more than eight times the surface of earth.
“Chunks” of world data are generated as you explore.

The problem is more likely due to the volume of tirs (three edged polygons) that are needed to process for occlusion, back-face culling, and the fact that Minecraft is not optimized for low end video cards, or software rendering modes.

That, and the fact that it is not likely very optimized in general, since it is still in active development. No use waisting time making things work faster if you can’t be sure where the bottleneck will be.

Also, if there is a twenty sided Minecraft server configured, can I suggest the name “Combinecraft” or “Combminecraft”

Given that Minecraft is the most awesome use of procedural generation in gaming history, I was surprised that you hadn’t talked about it sooner.

Not surprised to hear you’re addicted like the rest of us.

I would love to hear you talk about Minecraft with your programmer / designer hat on, what you think about the procedural generation.

I also think the success of the Alpha build is really interesting: Imagine you had a grand idea for a painting. You make a rough sketch that doesn’t at all capture your vision. You show it some people and they love it. They pass it around. It is hailed as one of the best drawings ever. And you’re thinking, “But it’s not finished yet…It’s supposed to be…”

I’ll grant you that Dwarf Fortress is probably more awesome, (I haven’t played it but the stories of other people’s games are pretty amazing) and I’d also enjoy reading Shamus on procedural generation in DF, but Minecraft is what I’d most like to hear him talk about.